It’s PLEDGE DRIVE time again! WHTM is ad free and entirely dependent on folks like you for its continued existence. If you can afford it, please DONATE HERE NOW! Thanks!

By David Futrelle

Earlier today, browsing my way around Twitter, I ran across something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before: A Sarah Huckabee Sanders meme … made by an actual fan of the bullying, truth-challenged press secretary.

But there it was, in all of its absurd glory, portraying Sanders as a right-wing reincarnation of Xena, the ass-kicking Warrior Princess that captured the hearts of so many feminists and lesbians two decades ago. (And me too, though I might have had a slightly bigger crush on her sidekick Gabrielle.)

That’s Jim Acosta at her feet, by the way.

Pondering this weird juxtaposition of a fictional character I love and a real person I hate, I wondered if there were more out there like this — a vast collection of pro-Sarah-Sanders memes that, in my various excursions into Trumpworld online, I had somehow inexplicably missed?

Oh sure, I’ve seen a lot of memes directed against Sanders — too many of them, unfortunately, mocking her weight, or her oddly asymmetrical eyes, or some other unfortunate physical asset instead of the hateful venality that is the centerpiece of her actual villainy. But I hadn’t seen any pro-Sanders memes I could remember.

After more than a few mostly fruitless searches, I discovered that this was because there really aren’t that many pro-Sanders memes out there. Indeed, earlier this year when one MAGAhead asked the regulars on Reddit’s rabidly pro-Trump forum The_Donald to “post best Sarah memes” he got more than 300 upvotes, but not a single person besides him actually posted a meme.

Oh, sure, the MAGAs love the asshole press secretary. But she’s not really the kind of woman that MAGA men lust over or that MAGA women want to be. Republicans and right-wingers generally like their women to be blond, thin Aryan goddesses or, failing that, just blonde, thin and reasonably Aryan — think Tomi Lahren, or Ann Coulter, or the woman of Fox News. Some brunettes are allowed into the club as well, but only if they’re considered sufficiently glamorous — and that’s a term few would apply to Sanders.

MAGA memesters are much more comfortable working her into memes that celebrate what they clearly see as the quasi-masculine toughness she shows in shutting down journalists, with many of them constructing Sanders-specific versions of the Thug Life meme.

But these memes don’t really work; even aside from their physical incongruity with the Sarah Sanders we see on TV every day, they don’t capture her aggressive energy. (The Thug Life memes, for all of their ridiculousness, do that much better, though at the cost of downplaying her femininity.)

And so it makes a certain sense that so many MAGA memesters eager to celebrate Sanders should have turned to Xena — a character, as played by Lucy Lawless, who managed to be big and tough and feminine all at once. And a long-haired brunette to boot.

This is hardly the first times that conservatives have tried to claim Xena as their own. In the first George W. Bush administration, White House staffers referred to then-national-security-advisor Condoleezza Rice as their “warrior princess.” And conservative writer Cathy Young — you may remember her as a Gamergate booster who infamously appeared on a triple-bill with Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers — once wrote a lengthy appreciation of Xena for Salon, portraying the warrior princess as an Amazonian version of a so-called “equity feminist,” a woman whose feminism consisted of standing up for herself but never actually offering any real critique of sexism or patriarchy.

But Sanders — like Rice before her — makes a pretty lousy Xena. The original warrior princess, you may recall, started her career as a villainous warlord squaring off against Kevin Sorbo as Hercules on his TV series before renouncing her evil ways and teaming up with him.

On her own series, the repentant warrior princess, forever tormented by her past evil deeds, tried her best to redeem herself by fighting for what she called “the greater good.” But because of her past she never thought of herself as a paragon of goodness.

Sanders, by contrast, is a villain who doesn’t seem to know she’s a villain — and if she knows, she certainly doesn’t care. She energetically and aggressively defends Trump’s lies on a daily basis, piling her own lies atop his. She excuses and justifies Trump’s violations of human rights and presidential norms and basic human decency.

And she’s no feminist, not even one of the watered-down “equity” variety: she doesn’t just ignore the patriarchy; she actively supports it — going so far as to aggressively defend Trump’s lie-filled mockery of Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford. If she has a conscience of any sort, she doesn’t seem to have ever displayed it in public.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, I used to watch Xena: Warrior Princess. I was a fan of Xena: Warrior Princess. And you’re no Xena: Warrior Princess.

I try not to think about Takara Lionel, or the Cryptkeeper’s less pleasant relative, or any of the Stepford anchors, unless absolutely necessary.

ETA: If there’s ever a new post on Sadly, No!, one whose comments are still open, you can expect comments-bot “daphne” to post that “think” clause and its surrounding sentence, regardless of their relevance to whatever is the topic of the post.

What’s wrong with how she looks? …Eh, maybe it’s not “what’s wrong” so much as “what doesn’t fit a narrow idea of beauty.” Still, just saying that I don’t register her as non-pretty, even though I don’t like watching her because I don’t want to hear what she says.

Anyway, thanks for the recap of the basic Xena story – I didn’t get into that show as a kid/teenager but it was floating in the background of my cultural consciousness. 🙂

I sometimes find myself thinking, about Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Ann Coulter or Ben Shapiro, something like “you’re pretty cute.” However, it’s always followed by a line from one of my favorite songs (“Leave a Light on, Thomas” by Ego Likeness):*

…but all I see is the blood you’ve spilt.

Which, incidentally, is something I’d never think about Xena, even with the whole ‘former-warlord and traveling, ass-kicking hero’ thing. Xena may have spilled a lot of blood, but she has actual positive traits.

*Prior to first hearing the song a few years back, it was just “…but you’re still a contemptible asshole.” Sometimes it still is, but the new way has more poetry.

What makes Huckabee-Sanders utterly like Xena is surely that she isn’t fighting for any particular principles or even for her own victory. She’s debasing herself for her boss, a man of no principles himself.

It really is true what they say, the right can’t make decent memes to save their lives. Why is it that all the funniest people are liberals? The only right leaning people I can think of who are even remotely funny are these perpetually bitter whining “old man yells at cloud” comics who I can’t tolerate for long regardless of their politics. I can’t tell if it’s because people on the right are always too mad to lighten up and actually make a joke instead of a humorless attack on their enemies, or if it’s because being funny requires a certain cleverness and sense of irony that the right just doesn’t have.

My favourite moment was when Xena and Gabrielle were bored and did charades. Gabrielle’s turn and I blurted out to the screen “Iphegenia at Aulis!” My ex was like “What?”. Xena didn’t get it either, but I was right…

It’s her expression: grumpy, miserable, mean. Based on the theory everyone over 40 has the face they deserve – well, oh dear.

And her behaviour. She has a choice over her behaviour.

But, I don’t know: there’s something depressingly predictable about deciding the women you agree with politically must be “hot” and feeling the need to announce it (and the converse: the moment Taylor Swift annoyed people she “became” overweight, ugly and talentless).

It’s almost like someone thinks the arbitrary assignation of “hotness” is a woman’s highest possible accolade.

Clearly, Sarah is Xena before she was Xena. She’s a Xena in the making, a potential Xena, and her transformation from enabler-of-a-warlord to rescuer-of-the-oppressed will happen any damn day now.

So, she’s a kind of Xenamorph?

She’s a thoroughly hateful person, but, eh, she’s a Huckabee: what do you expect? As far as I can see, the family is infused with a particularly malignant form of Christianity, which allows them to believe they’re good people while lying through their teeth, shitting on the poor, killing dogs, whatever.

nra’s fable is actually “a WHITE guy with a gun” The reality is, if a good person tries to use a gun to stop a bad person with a gun, the current odds very much favor the good person with a gun getting aced by the cops.

Not really sure how all that “Thug Life” ‘shopping is supposed to make her look actually cool. If anything, it just lends credence to the idea that she’s got to be high on something to be spouting so much blatant bullshit.

Also, since when is Xena anyone’s press flack/lackey/flunkie? She’s supposed to be the one with the sidekick, not the sidekick herself!

Ah well. As usual, all it goes to show is that the right can’t meme for shit.

(It is kind of touching, in a pathetic way, that they would TRY to make her look like something better than she is, though.)

Donate to the Mammoth!

We Hunted the Mammoth is an ad-free, reader-supported publication written and published by longtime journalist David Futrelle, who has been tracking, dissecting, and mocking the growing misogynistic backlash since 2010, exposing the hateful ideologies of Men’s Rights Activists, incels, alt-rightists and many others.

We depend on support from people like you. Please consider a donation or a monthly pledge by clicking below! there's no need for a PayPal account.

Send comments, questions, and tips for stories to me at dfutrelle@gmail.com, or by clicking here